I am a NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow. I work between
Baylor College of Medicine (advised by Wah Chiu) and
Stanford School of Medicine (advised be Michael Levitt, Russ Altman,
and Scott Delp). My research is about constructing simplified/approximate
representation of conformation spaces using Probabilistic Roadmaps (PRMs).
This has applications in robotics, computational structural biology,
and computer-graphics/media.

One of my current projects (with Baylor College of Medicine)
involves Electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) -- an emerging technology
for determining structures of large proteins (biological machines:
viruses, chaperonins, ribosomes, enzymes, etc.)
which is otherwise too difficult for conventional methods (such
as X-ray crystallography).
Single particle cryo-EM images often contain information about
mixed conformations. We intend to use the
available information to guide the construction of a simplified
representation of the conformation space
(using motion planning techniques) from which one can extract
ensemble of potential structural models representing the dynamic
nature of the biological machine. As of now I have successes with
two biological nano-motors myosin-II and myosin-V1.

I graduated with a PhD (advised by Jean-Claude Latombe) from
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Prior to that, I obtained a BS degree from Indian Institute of
Technology (IIT) Kanpur.
During my PhD, I focused on Robot Motion Planning,
developing new motion planners based on Probabilistic Roadmaps for
planning guaranteed collision-free paths, multi-goal tours, paths
in difficult and high-dimensional configuration spaces,
and robotic manipulation of deformable objects (knot-tying).
For the next few years I would like to focus on the applications of motion
planning techniques in computational structural biology and computer-graphics (digital-actors).